4 comments:

My teacher is always quoting this passage! Doxa kai eucharistia - "glory and gratitude" as the basic condition of "seeing" everything as it really is, of not being a "fool". That wasn't your question, though ;o)

You were asking us to identify the logical fallacy in Hawking's notion that God is "redundant", within Hawkings own terms of reference (which, presumably, don't involve the non-quantifiables doxa kai eucharistia). Of course I can't enter Hawking's "system", which involves categories far beyond my own capability and understanding; I have little doubt, however, that in the absence of doxa kai eucharistia, it's possible for someone determined to do so, at some level to construct a self-contained, self-referential but "logically" robust model of the cosmos and its origins within which the "God hypothesis" is surplus to requirements - within which the idea of the "law" pre-supposing a "law-Giver" is simply meaningless. I wrote: “The cosmos is open to rational investigation, but things deduced in the created order don't necessarily touch upon the Uncreated” - emphasis on “necessarily”, meaning, precisely, “in logic merely, and in the absence of glory and gratitude”.

The immediate fallacy therefore is the "straw man", isn't it? The "God" that Hawking dispenses with is a philosophical construct, a logical hypothesis - "of the Philosophers, not of the Fishermen" - comprehensible, circumscribable, a requirement of "obsolete" categories. I imagine it's possible to keep this god at bay almost indefinitely, if one is determined to do so, provided God Himself does not break in, making possible that "doxa kai eucharistia" in the light of which in turn, we are able to know that He is the origin and meaning of all things.

God is not circumscribed by logical necessity. He is hypostatis, not hypothesis!.

Can I just add that, as Fr Tom Hopko is always saying, the God that we bring to the debate with science had better be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; of Our Lord Jesus Christ, crucified, raised and glorified secundum scripturas, through Whom and for Whom "all things were made": the God Who seeks to unite the cosmos to Himself through the divinization of his rational creatures, and not some other god - neither some metaphysical abstraction necessitated by logical deduction, nor the anthropomorphic projection of modern "Biblical" fundamentalism.